


it’s your love i’m lost in

by casfallsinlove



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Road Trips, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-13 23:56:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21006293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casfallsinlove/pseuds/casfallsinlove
Summary: Castiel takes the time to write in his journal. He has almost filled this notebook, his jottings and ramblings interspersed with quick pen sketches and neat Enochian lettering. Sometimes he writes about Dean in Enochian: the color of his eyes, the shape of his mouth when he kisses Castiel, how angry he makes Castiel feel sometimes, how happy. Dean caught him drawing their hands once, fingers threaded and palms touching, pressed into the mattress, and he’d gone quiet and shuttered and not mentioned it again. Castiel draws things like that anyway. Plants, insects, rain clouds. He has found that nice things are often fleeting and ephemeral, worthy of recording.





	it’s your love i’m lost in

**Author's Note:**

> this is set in some nebulous canon time where jack isn’t around and mary is still alive and cas is human by choice
> 
> it’s been a very long time since I last wrote deancas so be gentle with me!

At night in the Mojave desert the sky is inky-black, but the stars sweep across in thick, glittering constellations and the moon is bigger than it ever seems in the city. A huge, mottled sphere hung in the sky, a heliograph, casting silvery shadows inside their tent and highlighting the gentle ridges of Dean’s face—a path for Castiel to follow with his lips.

Somewhere, a coyote howls; a hollow, sad whine that gets drowned out by the soft, breathy gasps Dean makes between deep kisses. Castiel feels like he’s on fire, the scorching heat of the day nothing now that he’s faced with Dean’s drugging mouth, hot and lush. The temperature has dropped outside, night-cool, but inside their tiny two-person tent a sheen of sweat clings to their half-naked bodies. 

Sleeping bags pushed aside, the thin foam mats they grabbed at a Target in Bakersfield aren’t doing much to pad the jagged rocks underneath. A stone is digging into Castiel’s shoulder blade, another poking his thigh. He lifts his leg, hooks it around Dean’s waist, uses it to push them closer instead. Dean gasps his name, sucking at the soft skin of Castiel’s neck. His hips rock, slow and steady. He’s still wearing his boxers, the cotton damp and creased, and it creates a delightful, glorious friction against Castiel’s bare cock. At least Dean managed to get his shirt off--Castiel couldn’t even do that, such was his desperation. 

When he comes, it’s with Dean frantically thrusting against him and his arms coiled tight around Dean’s neck, all the better to kiss his face and whisper nice things in his ear. How good he is, how beautiful, how hard he made Castiel come and how he loves to feel Dean’s own release on his skin. They’re still intertwined minutes later, shivering with pleasure as they come down from the high. The coyote cries again, closer this time. It seems to jolt Dean back to wakefulness. He pushes up to his elbows, drops a last kiss to Castiel’s cheek, and rolls away with a shy, almost embarrassed smile. It’s nothing Castiel isn’t used to. By the time he’s stripped his t-shirt off and used it to clean up as much as he can, Dean is zipped into his own sleeping bag and snoring. Castiel copies him, but rest seems impossible when his entire being feels so alive. 

  
  
  
  


They’re back on the road by five the next morning, the campsite a dusty orange speck in the rearview mirror, softened by the hardly-there dawn light. By eight the sun is pounding through the windshield. Castiel unfolds the blue plastic sunglasses he picked up at a Fuel & Go in Nevada for $2.99, uses his whole palm to shove them on his face. He chances a glance over at Dean, driving with one arm hanging out the window. His fingers tap the wheel in rhythm with the music that's softly leaking from the speakers. That means he's in a good mood. Castiel tries not to presume that it has anything to do with himself. 

“You hungry?” Dean asks. 

Castiel isn’t, it’s too early, but he says, “I’d enjoy breakfast.” Eating is generally a tedious task, but he likes it when it means sitting across from Dean in a sticky booth, their knees touching under the table. 

“There's a diner a few miles ahead,” Dean tells him, his eyes still fixed on the road. “We’ll stop.”

Castiel wants to put his hand on Dean’s arm. He doesn't. Just tips his head against the window, shuts his eyes behind his glasses and says, “Okay.”

  
  
  
  


Las Cruces is even hotter than California was, skirting the rocky edges of the Chihuahuan Desert and within spitting distance of the Mexican Border. The man at the motel front desk is old and smoking a cigar. A grubby white undershirt is stretched over his protruding belly and he’s shouting down the phone at someone in Spanish about what sounds like a badly placed bet. He eyes Castiel like he dares him to interrupt so Castiel pretends to pick over the sparse vending machine contents and tries to catch the breeze from the slowly rotating desk fan while he waits. 

The room he eventually acquires is just as hot as the front office. Castiel can feel sweat sticking his t-shirt to his back and dampening his hairline. It’s awful. Dean bangs in after him with their bags, muttering curse words under his breath and jabbing at the air-conditioning unit until it starts wheezing out cooler air.

“So I'm thinking we hang here for a few hours, head out once the sun starts to set,” he tells Castiel, throwing him his duffel bag. Castiel catches it with both hands and drops it to the end of his bed. “It’ll be darker but I need to cool down, man. ‘Sides, chupacabra’s a cake-walk.”

“Okay,” Castiel agrees. Dean  _ is _ looking a little pink from their trudging through the Mojave. Freckles bloom like blossom across his face and neck. Last night Castiel had kissed them until they were smudged with bruises, but those marks have faded now, not dark enough to see. 

They order in pizza while they wait. Castiel takes the time to write in his journal. He has almost filled this notebook, his jottings and ramblings interspersed with quick pen sketches and neat Enochian lettering. Sometimes he writes about Dean in Enochian: the color of his eyes, the shape of his mouth when he kisses Castiel, how angry he makes Castiel feel sometimes, how happy. Dean caught him drawing their hands once, fingers threaded and palms touching, pressed into the mattress, and he’d gone quiet and shuttered and not mentioned it again. Castiel draws things like that anyway. Plants, insects, rain clouds. He has found that nice things are often fleeting and ephemeral, worthy of recording. 

The sky is a gentle purple when Sam calls to say he and Mary have wrapped up the ghost in Kentucky and are heading back to the bunker. Dean had put the phone on speaker but now he bites his lip, glancing at Castiel before he says, “Yeah, we’re gonna stay on the road a bit longer.”

Castiel smiles. 

  
  
  


“You know how long it’s been since I last saw the ocean?” Dean says, apropos of nothing, as they’re cruising down I-20 in Texas having just dispatched a couple of ghouls in Wills Point. 

Castiel had been staring out of the window, half-dozing as the yellowed, deadened grass whips by and a rusty freight train the color of dirt trundles alongside them. Now, he sits up straighter and blinks a few times to wake up; he doesn’t like the feeling of lethargy, like all his limbs are weighted down with sand. As a soldier he would be useless like this.

He remembers Dean asked him a question. “How long?”

“Too fuckin’ long. Let’s go.”

The prospect of ending up by the water, where the air is fresher and the drudgery of driving through the desert is gone, fills Castiel’s chest with a fluttery kind of anticipation. 

“Okay,” he agrees. “Where?”

Dean shoots him a wink, “I know a place.”

  
  
  
  


They stop overnight in New Orleans, and Castiel falls in love. 

According to Dean, a motel on the outskirts of town wouldn’t do this place justice so he finds them a vacation rental in the French Quarter, a loft full of honey-colored hardwood floors and a huge bed with soft white sheets made golden by the sunlight pouring through the windows. They dump their bags then wander the city for hours, until the sun begins to set and the bars and restaurants come to life. Music is everywhere in this place; jazz, blues, a little hip hop. It filters out of open doorways and spills into the streets, where people laugh and dance and drink. A rainbow of lights blink and splinter around Castiel as he tries to take it all in. Even Dean seems to catch the good mood, his smile infectious and honest. 

They try a bar with an outside seating area, order ice-cold cokes and drink them slowly in green and orange metal chairs. The glass sweats in Castiel’s hand; he wipes it on his jeans and finds Dean watching him. A breath catches in Castiel’s throat at the look in Dean’s eyes. 

He finishes his drink in one long swallow. “Come on,” he says, and reaches out. 

Dean hesitates for a second before grabbing hold and standing. He sways into Castiel’s space. His breath is warm on Castiel’s cheek, sugar-sweet. Something zips through Castiel like lightning and he leads the way back onto the street, hails a passing cab and gives the driver their rental address. 

Dean doesn’t let go of his hand the whole way back. 

It feels like a dream, like something that could only happen to someone else, as they stand in the middle of the loft with nothing but pink neon and streetlights to guide them, and Castiel gently takes Dean’s face in his palms and kisses the crinkles around his eyes, his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose, the corner of his lips. Dean is panting like he’s run a marathon, his fist gripping Castiel’s t-shirt so tightly his knuckles are digging into the flesh underneath. This is new. They’re not soft like this normally--their unspoken trysts are usually quick, rough and spur of the moment. Being here in this otherworldly city has shaken something loose in the both of them. 

Castiel kisses Dean’s mouth. Dean kisses back, changes the angle and lights a fire in Castiel’s chest. One hand slides into Castiel’s hair, the other under his shirt to curl around his ribs. 

The bed is right there, soft and inviting. Gently pushing Dean backwards, Castiel crawls after him onto the mattress. They’re hard in their jeans, pushing against each other steady as the tide, until Dean loses patience, stripping his clothes and then slowly, carefully, removing Castiel’s. He pants against the skin he reveals, not enough finesse to be a real kiss but too intimate to be anything else. 

Whole body alight, Castiel begs Dean to take him, and Dean does, so easy and pressed so close that Castiel feels as if he’s drowning, fingertips pressing half-moons into the soft skin of Dean’s back, and when the wave crests and breaks he gasps, so human, and Dean curses, kisses him fiercely, desperately, and Castiel  _ understands _ now, can see so clearly that what they’ve just done is definitely, undeniably, undisputedly, making love. And like a ship caught in a storm, it wrecks him. 

  
  
  
  
  


A vamp nest in Cotton County, Oklahoma, sends them in the opposite direction for four days. The hunt is unpleasant from start to finish, leaving Castiel with a sprained wrist and Dean with a nasty gash on his shoulder. But they save a young girl and leave a small town in relative peace, which Dean declares is “a job well done”. They detour through Arkansas to get back on track, neither one of them keen to experience the tedium of Texan desert again, and it’s there that Castiel spots a road sign and makes them visit the Hot Springs National Park, where they go up the Mountain Tower and Castiel kisses Dean 215 feet in the air, smiling into Dean’s pouting mouth while he grumbles about the height. 

He also kisses Dean at gas stations while they’re filling up the car, in the laundromat at 4 a.m. against a dryer until someone else came in, at a quiet fishing spot in Mississippi because dusk was falling and no one was looking, over cheap coffee in dingy motel rooms when he’s still ruffled from sleep. Sometimes Dean startles, looking around furtively, other times he grins and pulls Castiel closer by the hips, and occasionally he doesn’t even blink, like kissing Castiel is just an everyday part of his life now.

Castiel doesn’t ask where they’re going. Dean has a plan, he says, promises that Castiel will like it, and Castiel is content enough to follow.

  
  
  
  


The end of the road turns out to be South Carolina. The Isle of Palms is almost idyllic; white sands and blue waters lapping at the edges of large ranch-style homes. 

“I saw sea turtles here once,” Dean tells him as they sit on the beach, knees pulled up under their chins. It’s dark now and a sharp chill blows in off the ocean, making the hairs on Castiel’s arms stand up. “One of the only times my dad ever did anything fun with us. We camped out and watched them all come out the water to lay their eggs.”

And suddenly Castiel aches. He wants to reach out and hold Dean, to keep him close and ask him what he thinks they’re doing here, if this is forever or just a flight of fancy. He wants to tell Dean he loves him without fear of repercussion. He wants to kiss and kiss him until there is no breath left in his human lungs. There are so many things he wants he can almost feel the desperation bursting out of him. 

“Dean.” The word comes out as a growl, full of unsaid things and frustration. 

Dean hangs his head, digging his toes into the sand. The moonlight casts half his face into shadow. 

“I don’t know how to say it, Cas,” he says softly. “But you gotta know, right?”

It’s not good enough. Castiel doesn’t know. So often he has been mistaken about things, and this he needs to be really sure about. 

“No.” 

Dean huffs, rubbing his hands over his face. Castiel pulls his hoodie sleeves over his wrists, chews on his lip. He may not get an answer from Dean. Past experience tells him that this level of emotional conversation can’t end well. 

Suddenly unable to sit there any longer, Castiel gets to his feet and brushes sand off his jeans. “I’m going back to the motel.”

He means to give Dean time to think—they’ve been living out of each other’s pockets for weeks now so it’s understandable that they might need a bit of space—but before he can go anywhere Dean reaches up and yanks on his arm, tugging him back down. Then there’s a mouth on Castiel’s mouth, a hot and heavy body pressing him into the sand, knees bracketing Castiel’s thighs. Dean’s kisses are soft and lovely. His hand cups the side of Castiel’s jaw, gentle. These are kisses Castiel could get lost in. 

But Dean breaks away with a quiet noise. He doesn’t go far, nosing at Castiel’s cheek, and whispers, “I don’t think I’m good for you.”

Something sharp spears Castiel behind his ribs. He swallows hard, makes sure Dean is looking him in the eye, gaze shuttered in the darkness, before he says, “I don’t think I’m good for you either. We’ve hurt each other, it’s no good pretending we haven’t. But this?” He palms Dean’s chest, sucks a little at his lower lip for a moment. “This feels like what I’ve been waiting for. I’ve existed for millennia and I’ve never been more certain about anything. It’s all right to be scared, but Dean. It’s just me. It’s  _ us _ .”

Dean shudders above Castiel. The night sky behind his head is bright with stars. The quiet shush of the ocean is the only sound besides their ragged breathing. 

“I can’t lose you,” Dean eventually says, so painfully vulnerable. Castiel reaches up and lays his hands either side of Dean’s face. 

“You won’t.”

The moment feels fragile; Castiel aches to do more, to  _ say _ more, but he waits. Dean smiles, and nothing is ever easy for the two of them but Castiel thinks maybe this is something that might just go right for a change. He smiles back. 


End file.
